In the middle of his run of the Hulk relaunch in 2008, Jeph Loeb collaborated with three of the comics industry’s best artists, Ed McGuinness. Art Adams and Frank Cho. Though immensely talented, this trio has had troubles meeting deadlines and the title’s monthly schedule dictated that an artist must be able to produce pages regularly in order for the book to ship on time.

I believed that Loeb and his editor managed to create a novel solution. McGuinness would be the regular artist, since of the three; he was the last to handle a regular monthly title. But would breaks in between story arcs in order to prepare his next assignment. His art graced the first six issues and then he took a break. This way, the first trade of the new Hulk title would have a single uniform look. The second arc was handled by Adams and Cho, two artists who had a nice detailed finish to their pencils but were so slow that the only way they could handle six issues would be to have a sufficiently long lead time, probably at least a year. The only way they could do a regular monthly title would for them to get together on one title which did on Hulk. Adams did a story that was half an issue, while Cho would do the other half. It was a workable solution; still they only managed three consecutive issues for their arc.

Adams is known to have a penchant for monsters and Loeb wrote for him a script where Bruce Banner turned into both his grey and green Hulk alter egos and fighting a pack of Wendigos. On the other hand Cho is known for his cheesecake interpretations of Marvel women, so he drew a revenge story, where She Hulk assembles a dream team of voluptuous Marvel heroine on a mission to take down the Red Hulk. That is not all, they even got classic Hulk artist Herb Trimpe to draw a back-up flash back sequence and Chris Giarrusso of Mini Marvels fame to draw Audrey Loeb’s mischievous little stories of multicolored little Hulks.

Loeb did a great job of tailoring his scripts to the artists’ strengths and preferences and it shows. This is the best work I’ve seen from both Adams and Cho from that year. This is a great read, full of fight sequences between monster and monster, though the Red Hulk may have gotten the best deal.

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